legenda studies in comparative literature - Oxbow Books

The David Brown Book Company Presents New and Forthcoming titles in 

Literature 

Dear Diego 

by Elena Poniatowska, translated with an 

introduction by Nathanial Gardner 

When Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, 

was sifting through the painter’s jumbled collection 

of correspondence, he encountered a series of 

Parisian letters from the Russian painter Angelina 

Beloff. Long before Diego became famous for his 

Mexican murals or his renowned wife, Frida Kahlo, 

he was married to Beloff. Wolfe was impressed by 

the letters and included a chapter on them in his biography of the muralist. 

Several years later, Mexican author Elena Poniatowska decided to rewrite them. 

The result is Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, a masterful blending of fact and 

fiction that creates a novella out of twelve imagined letters that Angelina 

writes to Diego over a nine-month period. This bilingual edition is a new 

initiative that introduces the reader to the work of one of Mexico’s most 

celebrated female writers and helps the student and enthusiast understand 

this author’s place and importance in Latin American letters. 266p. 

Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, 2012 

9780856688805, hardback – $80.00. Special Offer $64.00 

9780856688812, paperback – $25.00. Special Offer $20.00 

Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages 

edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, 

Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden 

This volume takes Dante’s rich and multifaceted 

discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the 

Commedia, as a point of departure in 

investigating medieval concepts of desire in all 

their multiplicity, fragmentation and 

interrelation. As well as offering several original 

contributions on this fundamental aspect of 

Dante’s work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the 

broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual 

exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The 

volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological 

approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms 

can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged 

with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture. 200p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, July 2012 


Revolutionary Women Writers 

Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams 

by Angela Keane 

This book brings together two of the most 

significant British women writers of the Romantic 

period, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria 

Williams, and explores the poetics and politics of 

their work. In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith 

and Helen Maria Williams were at the peak of 

their critical reputations, they were known to 

each other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who provided 

the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when 

he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by the time he got there). By the 

end of the decade, Smith and Williams were being cited together more 

pejoratively, as two of a number of women who came to stand for the amoral, 

sexually suspect and politically naïve English ‘Jacobins,’ who were vilified in the 

conservative press. Neither were in fact ‘Jacobins,’ but they were revolutionary. 

This book looks at how Smith and Williams earned such reputations and at the 

politics and poetics of the works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed 

Romantic and Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise. 128p. 

Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, July 2012 


9780746309711, paperback – Was $26.00. Now just $19.95 

Tirso de Molina 

Marta the Divine 

translated with an introduction by Harley 

Erdman 

Tirso de Molina’s Marta the Divine (c. 1614-15) is 

a spirited comedy about an ingenious young 

woman who fakes religious piety in order to 

avoid an arranged marriage imposed upon her 

by her father. Marta has been a controversial 

play over the years, condemned for immorality 

and salaciousness by some, championed as an anticlerical tract by others. No 

matter one’s perspective, Marta is memorable because of the audaciousness 

and resourcefulness of the title character. This edition presents the play for the 

first time ever in English translation. The translation is accompanied by the 

Spanish text, translators’ note and a substantial introduction. 112p. 

Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, July 2012 



www.oxbowbooks.com — toll-free 1-800-791-9354 Quote discount code 502-12 1

Aris & Phillips 

Aris & Phillips has been an imprint of Oxbow Books since 2002. The Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics series publishes editions 

of Hispanic texts from the Middle Ages, through the Golden Age, to twentieth century literature including plays, poetry, 

and novels. The volumes include wide-ranging introductions, translator’s notes and select bibliographies. Each text is 

presented in the original language, with facing page English translation. The series editor is Dr Jonathan Thacker of Merton 

College, Oxford. We welcome proposals for submissions, please visit www.oxbowbooks.com 

Tirso de Molina 

Jealous of Herself 

translated with an introduction by Harley 

Erdman 

Tirso de Molina’s Jealous of Herself (c. 1622-23) is 

an ingenious comedy of disguise and deception 

set in the streets, plazas, and fashionable 

apartments of early 17th- century Madrid. It 

follows a lofty-minded man who worships an 

idealised image of a woman. Attention is shifted from the dreamer to the 

dreamed - that is, to the individual trapped in and torn apart by this fantasy, 

the young woman, Doña Magdalena. Her internal conflict - the fact that she 

finds herself jealous of herself - ultimately becomes the axis of the play. The 

play is carefully structured and builds relentlessly, climaxing with two great 

set-piece scenes that deserve to be on any list of great Renaissance-era stage 

moments. This book is the first-ever English translation. 304p. 

Aris & Phillips, Hispanic Classics, July 2012 



Pedro Calderón de la Barca 

Life’s a Dream 

translated and with an introduction by 

Michael Kidd 

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a 

shadow, a fiction; and the greatest good is 

fleeting, for all life is a dream, and even dreams 

are but dreams. That is the haunting lesson 

learned by Prince Sigismund in Life’s a Dream, the 

best known and most widely admired play of 

Catholic Europe’s greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Nowhere is 

Calderón’s talent more evident than in this poignant tale of a prince imprisoned 

at birth by his astrologer-king father and liberated on the same day a beautiful 

woman stumbles into his life. The volume comes with a generous set of 

supplementary materials including critical introduction, translator’s notes, 

suggestions for directors, bibliography, and glossary. 266p. 




Pepita Jiménez 

A Novel by Juan Valera 

translated from the Spanish by Robert M. 

Fedorchek, introduction by James Whiston 

The unifying thread of the work of Juan Valera y 

Alcalá-Galiano (1824-1905), is art for art’s sake, 

that is, beauty as the end and purpose of 

imaginative literature, an ideal epitomised by 

Pepita Jiménez, long considered one of the best 

novels of 19th-century Spain. When it was first published in 1874, Pepita 

Jiménez became an instant success. It tells of Luis de Vargas, a devout twentytwo-year-old 

seminarian who has come home to visit with his father before 

entering the priesthood. The storyline unfolds when he meets a comely 

twenty-year-old widow named Pepita Jiménez and has his religious calling put 

to the test. 295p. 




2 Quote discount code 502-12 www.oxbowbooks.com — toll-free 1-800-791-9354

Legenda from Maney Publishing 

Legenda is a book imprint jointly owned by Maney Publishing, a leading independent academic publisher, and 

the Modern Humanities Research Association, one of the UK’s most important learned societies. Titles range 

from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, 

including works on English, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. For more 

information, visit www.legendabooks.com 

LEGENDA MAIN SERIES 

The main Legenda series, with its distinctive blue cover, presents titles across a wide range of cultural topics. 

Pessoa in an Intertextual Web 

Influence and Innovation 

edited by David G. Frier 

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is Portugal’s most 

celebrated poet of the twentieth century, who wrote 

under the guise of dozens of literary personalities. As well 

as his poetry, however, his work is marked by a constantly 

inventive and innovative engagement with authors and literary traditions from a 

variety of sources, placing him firmly in the worldwide literary canon. This volume 

brings together a number of experts at the forefront of Pessoa studies, with 

chapters examining his literary relations with Italy, Spain, France, England and 

Portugal, as well as his contextualisation in relation to major philosophers such as 

Kant and Nietzsche. It also includes consideration of his prose masterpiece The 

Book of Disquiet, as well as of various aspects of his poetic oeuvre. 200p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, 2012 


Regarding Lost Time 

Photography, Identity and Affect in Proust, 

Benjamin, and Barthes 

by Katja Haustein 

What is autobiography and how does it transform in the 

age of technological reproducibility? Katja Haustein 

discusses this question as it relates to photography and 

the role of emotion in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter 

Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes’s 

Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). In her close critical readings, 

Haustein provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of these popular 

works, mapping them against little-studied textual, visual and aural material, 

some of which has only recently become accessible. Her book opens new 

avenues in scholarship dedicated to three outstanding twentieth-century 

writers and contributes to a field of critical inquiry that is still in the making: the 

history of autobiography in the light of a history of the gaze. 206p. 

Women, Genre and Circumstance 

Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize 

edited by Margaret Atack, Diana Holmes, Diana 

Knight, and Judith Still 

Women, Genre and Circumstance brings together a series 

of challenging essays which explore the complex 

intersections of feminism, narrative and genre. Drawing 

on a wide range of 19th and 20th century texts - novels, short stories and films 

- they interrogate the relationship between women’s situation and writing 

practice, and representations of history, memory, love, old age; they pursue 

questions of narrative form and its meanings, particularly the distinctive 

features of the short story. The politics of feminist criticism and careful 

attention to the operations of narrative combine in a sustained exploration of 

the aesthetics and ethics of fictional practices, and their role in the negotiation 

of gender and circumstance. The essays were written as tributes to the leading 

feminist scholar Elizabeth Fallaize. 200p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, August 2012 


Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot 

Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence 

by Tom Boll 

When the sixteen-year-old Octavio Paz (1914-1998) 

discovered The Waste Land in Spanish translation, it 

‘opened the doors of modern poetry’. The influence of 

T.S. Eliot would accompany Paz throughout his career, 

defining many of his key poems and pronouncements. Yet Paz’s attitude 

towards his precursor was ambivalent. Boll’s study is the first to trace the 

history of Paz’s engagement with Eliot in Latin American and Spanish 

periodicals of the 1930s and 40s. It reveals the fault lines that run through the 

work of the dominant figure in recent Mexican letters. By positioning Eliot in a 

Latin American context, it also offers new perspectives on one of the capital 

figures of Anglo-American modernism. 200p. 



Maney Publishing, Legenda Main Series, August 2012 




Proust, the One, and the Many 

Identity and Difference in A la recherche du 

temps perdu 

by Erika Fülöp 

One of the many aspects that make Marcel 

Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu such a 

complex and subtle work is its engagement with 

metaphysical questions. The disparate nature of 

the narrator’s experiences, hypotheses, and 

statements has generated a number of conflicting interpretations, based on 

parallels with the thought of one or another philosopher from Plato to Leibniz, 

Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze. Through the analysis 

of the narrator’s two seemingly incompatible perceptions of the world, which 

reveal reality to be either one or infinitely multiple, Erika Fülöp proposes a 

reading of the novel that reconciles the opposites. Rather than being 

undecided or self-contradictory, the narrative thematizes the insufficiency of 

the dualist perspective and invites the reader to take a step beyond it. 208p. 



Translating the Perception of Text 

Literary Translation and Phenomenology 

by Clive Scott 

Translation often proceeds as if languages 

already existed, as if the task of the translator 

were to make an appropriate selection from 

available resources. Clive Scott challenges this 

tacit assumption. If the translator is to do justice 

to himself/herself as a reader, if the translator is 

to become the creative writer of his/her reading, 

then the language of translation must be equal to the translator’s perceptual 

experience of, and bodily responses to, source texts. Each renewal of perceptual 

and physiological contact with a text involves a renewal of the ways we think 

language and use our expressive faculties (listening, speaking, writing). 

Phenomenology and particularly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty 

underpins this new approach to translation. The task of the translator is 

tirelessly to develop new translational languages, ever to move beyond the 

bilingual into the multilingual, and always to remember that language is as 

much an active instrument of perception as an object of perception. 200p. 



Renaissance Keywords 

edited by Ita Mac Carthy 

Certain words played a crucial role in the making 

of the European Renaissance, and still recur 

today in our shifting understanding of it. 

Discretion and grace, to take two examples 

studied here, express how individuals thought 

about themselves, each other and their 

experience of the world, yet they are as hard to 

define as they are ever-present in Renaissance 

discourse. This collection of essays offers new interpretations of these and 

other ‘keywords’ and provides a rich contextual framework for the exploration 

of central Renaissance ideas. The result is an exploration at the cutting edge of 

contemporary research. 200p. 

Dante in Oxford 

The Paget Toynbee Lectures 1995-2003 

edited by Martin McLaughlin and 

Michelangelo Zaccarello 

The Paget Toynbee lectures on Dante have taken 

place in Oxford since the mid-1990s. Named after 

the great medieval scholar of the first half of the 

twentieth century, they have been delivered by 

the major Dante experts of our time. This volume 

gathers together twelve of the most significant 

lectures, given by internationally renowned scholars such as Zygmunt Baranski, 

John Barnes, Lino Leonardi, Emilio Pasquini, Michelangelo Picone, Jonathan 

Usher and the late Peter Armour. The topics range from key questions such as 

Dante, Ovid and the poetry of exile, to ground-breaking work on obscenity in 

the Divine Comedy. 199p. 







Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism 

edited by David Adams and Galin Tihanov 

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together 

ten innovative contributions by outstanding 

scholars working across a wide array of disciplines 

in the humanities and social sciences. 

Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, 

with a strong comparative European dimension, 

the volume examines discourses ranging from 

literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political 

philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century 

ideas of universal peace, progress, and wealth as the foundation of future 

debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it analyses examples of 

counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the 

Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 

twenty-first century debates in sociology, politics, and legal theory. 174p. 

The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, 

Proust, and Deleuze 

by Thomas Baldwin 

The possibility of ekphrasis the verbal 

representation of visual imagery is fundamental 

to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory, 

or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus 

concerning how such representation works. Some 

take it for granted that writing about art can 

result in a precise match between words and 

visual images. For others, ekphrasis amounts to a kind of virtuoso rivalry, in 

which the writer aims to outdo the pictorial image that is being described. In 

close readings of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze, Thomas Baldwin shows how 

ekphrasis can create a spectral effect. In other words, ekphrastic spectres do 

not function as fully present stand-ins for given works of art; nor can they be 

reduced to the status of passive and absent others. Baldwin also explores the 

ways in which the works of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze inhabit each other as 

ghostly influences. 143p. 





Textual Wanderings 

The Theory and Practice of Narrative 

Digression 

edited by Rhian Atkin 

Digression is a crucial motif in literary narratives. 

It features as a key characteristic of fictional 

works from Cervantes and Sterne, to Proust, Joyce 

and Calvino. Moving away from a linear narrative 

and following a path of associations reflects how 

we think and speak. Yet an author’s inability to 

stick to the point has often been seen to detract from a work of literature, 

somehow weakening it. This wide-ranging and timely volume seeks to 

celebrate narrative digressions and move towards a theoretical framework for 

studying the meanderings of literary texts as a useful and valuable aspect of 

literature. Essays discussing some of the possibilities for approaching narrative 

digression from a theoretical perspective are complemented with focused 

studies of European and American authors. As a whole, the book offers a broad 

and varied view of textual wanderings. 129p. 



Post-War Jewish Women’s Writing in 

French 

Juives françaises ou Françaises juives? 

by Lucille Cairns 

How have French Jewish women reacted to the 

great traumas of the last century - the Holocaust, 

North African decolonization and the resulting 

migration of African Jews to France, the Arab- 

Israeli crisis and the aftermath of 9/11? Cairns’s 

major new volume identifies the themes of 

books by French Jewish women from 1945 to the present day, gauging to what 

extent they are dominated by these events. Thirty authors in particular serve as 

representatives of a great, and greatly diverse, pool: divided not only as 

Ashkenazim or Sephardim, but by origins scattered across Algeria, Egypt, 

Germany, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey. 

Theirs is a transnational, doubly-diasporic, and thus particularly complex 

paradigm in which feminism, loyalty to family culture and to the traditions of 

Judaism often exists in tension with French Republican models of assimilation, 

non-differentiation, and gender-blindness. 257p. 





Portuguese Modernisms 

Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts 

edited by Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro 

For a more encompassing and stimulating picture of 

Modernism - seen as a movement of the 20th century, a 

broad spectrum of work across many countries - we must 

explore its diversity. Portuguese Modernism manifested itself both in visual art 

and in literature, and made a vigorous contribution to this time of profound 

cultural change. Indeed, the sociocultural transformations that marked the 

early 20th century in Portugal are still current. This volume provides a critical 

guide for students and teachers, contributed to by an array of scholars with 

unparalleled knowledge of the period, its artists and its writers. 406p. 



English Responses to French Poetry 1880-1940 

Translation and Mediation 

by Jennifer Higgins 

Between 1880 and 1940, English responses to French poetry 

evolved from marginalised expressions of admiration 

associated with rebellion against the ‘establishment,’ to 

mainstream mutual exchange and appreciation. The translation of poetry 

underwent a simultaneous evolution, from attempts to produce definitive 

renderings to definitions of translation as an ongoing, generative process at the 

centre of literary debate. This study traces the impact of French poetry in 

England, via a wide range of translations by major poets of the time as well as 

renderings by now-forgotten writers. It explores poetry and translations beyond 

the limits of the usual canon, and identifies key moments of influence, from late 

nineteenth-century English homages to Victor Hugo as a liberal icon, to Ezra 

Pound re-interpreting Charles Baudelaire for the twentieth century. 155p. 



Reading Games in the Greek Novel 

by Eleni Papargyriou 

How is play constituent in the formation of the Greek 

modernist novel? Reflecting competition with European and 

North American models as well as internal antagonism with 

more established literary genres in Greece, the novel after 

the 1930s employed playfulness as a means to demonstrate or even perform 

its novelty. Innovations unexpectedly came from the Greek periphery rather 

than Athens, and the Greek novel swiftly exchanged a passively understood 

realism for communicative patterns that actively involve the reader and 

educate him into bringing scraps of plot into a meaningful synthesis. Featuring 

key Greek authors such as Yannis Skarimbas, Stratis Tsirkas and Nikos Kachtitsis, 

this is a comprehensive and innovative study of Greek modernist prose fiction 

and the first of its kind to appear in English. 186p. 



Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the 

Liability of Liberty 

by Bradley Stephens 

The arch-Romantic Victor Hugo (1802-85) and the Existentialist 

philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) are widely perceived to 

have little in common beyond their canonical status. However, 

responding to Sartre’s often overlooked fascination with Hugo, Bradley Stephens 

cuts through generic divisions to argue that significant parallels between the two 

writers have been neglected. Stephens argues that both Hugo and Sartre engage 

with human being in distinctly non-ontological terms, thereby anticipating 

postmodernist approaches to human experience. From different origins but 

towards similar realisations, they expose the indeterminate human condition as at 

once release and restriction. These writers insist that liberty is not simply a political 

ideal, but an existential condition which engages human endeavour as a dynamic 

rather than definitive mode of being. This incisive new book affirms the ongoing 

relevance of the two most iconic French writers of the modern period to 

contemporary discourse on what it means to be free. 178p. 



Examining Whiteness 

Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and 

Toni Morrison 

by Lucia Villares 

Critics consider Clarice Lispector the leading female writer in 

the Brazilian literary canon. Her connections with the nation, 

however, seem to magically disappear as her work is analyzed. This paradox is 

the starting point for this analysis of the works of an author who - despite being 

born in the Ukraine - grew up to be an irreplaceable presence in Brazilian 

literature. Non-Brazilian authors, such as the South African Bessie Head and the 

North American Toni Morrison, provide triggering concepts to help tackle a 

blind-spot in Brazilian culture: the issue of racial difference. From this new 

perspective, overlooked black characters in Lispector’s work become crucial and 

relevant, and whiteness emerges as an unexamined set of norms. 200p. 





The Truth of Realism 

A Reassessment of the German Novel 1830- 

1900 

by John Walker 

In his new book, Walker offers a radical 

reassessment of the German realist novel in the 

nineteenth century. Especially in the Englishspeaking 

world, German narrative realism has 

persistently been interpreted as the literary 

expression of an ‘ideology of the aesthetic’. The German realist novel is alleged 

to reflect philosophical idealism: to reject the ‘prose’ of modern society in favour 

of the ‘poetry’ of the inner aesthetic life. This book challenges that received 

view. Walker argues that German narrative realism should be read not only in 

relation to, but in crucial respects against, the dominant philosophical idiom of 

nineteenth century Germany. The core of the book is the close reading of eight 

of the best known realist novels in German by Keller, Raabe and Fontane. This 

reading shows how the German realist novel, far from transposing the 

assumptions of aesthetic idealism into narrative form, exposes the real 

consequences of those assumptions in the culture and society of its time. 213p. 



Proust Writing Photography 

Fixing the Fugitive in A la recherche due 

temps perdu 

by Aine Larkin 

The importance of vision and visual arts such as 

painting, theatre, and sculpture in Marcel Proust’s 

A la recherche du temps perdu has long been 

affirmed; another significant system of visual 

representation in the novel is photography. 

Proust appropriated photography as a practice 

with its own distinctive characteristics which could inform his writing about 

the processes of perception and memory. Through close textual analysis of 

scenes where photography is experienced or observed as a practice, and scenes 

where photography is written into the body of the text, Aine Larkin offers an 

invigorating new study that sheds genuinely new light on the presence of 

photographic motifs in Proust’s novel, and the subtlety of Proust’s engagement 

with this modern imaging system in his work. 222p. 



Mediterranean Travels 

Writing Self and Other from the Ancient 

World to the Contemporary Society 

edited by Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble, 

and Silvia Ross 

Written by leading scholars in the field, this 

collection analyzes the notion of travel writing as 

a genre, while tracing significant examples of 

Mediterranean travel writing that return us to 

Ancient Greece, to Medieval pilgrimages, to 

Venetians’ diplomatic missions, to an Egyptian’s account of Paris in the 

nineteenth century, to French artistic journeys in North Africa and to 

contemporary narratives of privileged resettlement, death, and dislocation. 

256p. 



Dante’s Plurilingualism 

Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity 

edited by Sara Fortuna, Manuele 

Gragnolati, and Jürgen Trabant 

Dante’s conception of language is encompassed 

in all his works and can be understood in terms 

of a strenuous defense of the volgare in tension 

with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together 

different approaches, from literary studies to 

philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer 

studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical 

insights on the question of Dante’s language, engaging with both the 

philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and 

the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and selfreflexive 

way. In particular, Dante’s Plurilingualism explores the rich and 

complex way in which Dante’s linguistic theory and praxis both informs and 

reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, 

knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but 

is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards 

multiplicity and modernity. 306p. 





LEGENDA ITALIAN PERSPECTIVES 

Italian Perspectives publishes books and collections of essays on any aspect and period of Italian literature, language, history, culture, politics, 

art, and media, as well as studies which take an interdisciplinary approach and are methodologically innovative. At a time of growing academic 

interest, the series aims to bring together different scholarly perspectives on Italy and its culture. 

Giraffes in the Garden of Italian Literature 

Modernist Embodiment in Italo Svevo, Federigo 

Tozzi and Carlo Emilio Gadda 

by Deborah Amberson 

Disrupted Narratives 

Illness, Silence and Identity in Svevo, 

Pressburger and Morandini 

by Emma Bond 

Writing in 1926, Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973) 

acknowledges his peculiarity within the Italian literary 

field by describing himself as a giraffe or a kangaroo in 

Italy’s beautiful garden of literature. Gadda’s selfcharacterization 

as an exotic and even ungainly animal applies in equal measure 

to Italo Svevo (1861-1928) and Federigo Tozzi (1883-1920), authors who, like 

Gadda, thwarted efforts at critical classification. Yet the ostensible strangeness of 

these three Italian authors is diminished when their writing is considered within 

the framework of modernism, a label traditionally avoided by the Italian critical 

establishment. Indeed, within a modernism preoccupied with human 

embodiment, these Italian literary giraffes find their kin. Here, the central nexus 

of body, subjectivity and style that informs and binds the writing of Svevo, Tozzi 

and Gadda resonates with a modernist renegotiation and revalorization of a 

human body whose dignity and epistemological authority have been contested 

by social and technological modernity. 186p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 22, 2012 


Remembering Aldo Moro 

The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping 

and Murder 

edited by Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi 

The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat 

politician, Aldo Moro, marked the watershed of Italy’s 

experience of political violence in the period known as 

the ‘years of lead’ (1969-c.1983). This highly 

interdisciplinary volume explores the evolving legacy of 

Moro’s death in the Italian cultural imaginary, from the late 1970s to the present. 

Bringing a wide range of critical perspectives to bear, interventions by experts in 

the fields of political science, social anthropology, philosophy, and cultural critique 

elicit new understandings of the events of 1978 and explain their significance and 

relevance to present-day Italian culture and society. 204p. 



If Madame Bovary’s death in Flaubert’s 1857 novel 

marked the definitive end of the Romantic vision of 

literary disease, then the advent of psychoanalysis less 

than half a century later heralded an entirely new set of 

implications for literature dealing with illness. The theorization of a potential 

unconscious double in turn suggested a capacity to subvert or destabilize the 

text, exposing the main thread of the narrative to be unreliable or self-conscious. 

Indeed, the authors examined in this study (Italo Svevo, Giorgio Pressburger and 

Giuliana Morandini) all make use of individual ‘infected’ or suppressed voices 

within their texts which unfold through illness to cast doubt on a more dominant 

narrative standpoint. Applying the theories of Freud and more recent writings by 

Julia Kristeva, Bond offers a new critical reading of the literary function of illness, 

a function related to the very nature of narration itself. 200p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Italian Perspectives 24, July 2012 


Ugo Foscolo and English Culture 

by Sandra Parmegiani 

The history of the literary relations between Italy and 

England has its most celebrated early modern 

representative in Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827). Foscolo’s 

translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey 

through France and Italy is often regarded as the 

benchmark of his English experience, but there is more 

that can be uncovered. With over 3,000 letters spanning three decades, Foscolo’s 

correspondence represents a unique perspective from which to monitor his literary, 

philosophical, and political views. The ‘Epistolario’ is also a space in which Foscolo 

engages with literary, philosophical, and moral questions, and a place where he 

exercises an often private form of literary criticism. These are letters which 

ultimately produce one of the most complete yet most composite self-portraits in 

the history of modern Italian autobiography. In the first comprehensive and 

historicized reading of Foscolo’s correspondence, Sandra Parmegiani reveals the rich 

and complex relations between the Italian writer and the literature, philosophy, 

and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century England. 152p. 





LEGENDA RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS IN FRENCH STUDIES 

Research Monographs in French Studies are selected and edited by the Society for French Studies. The series seeks to publish the best new work 

in all areas of the literature, thought, theory, culture, film and language of the French-speaking world. 

The Printed Media in Fin-de-siècle Italy 

Publishers, Writers, and Readers 

edited by Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella 

Romani, and Jennifer Burns 

The Unification of Italy in 1870 heralded a period of 

unprecedented change. While successive Liberal 

governments pursued imperial ventures and took Italy 

into World War One on the Allied side, on the domestic 

front technological advance, the creation of a national transport network, the 

expansion of state education, internal migration to cities and the rise of 

political associations all contributed to the rapid expansion of the print 

industry and the development of new and highly diversified reading publics. 

Drawing on publishers’ archives, letters, diaries, and printed material, this book 

provides the most up-to-date research into the printed media in Italy between 

1870 and 1914. This book is intended for those with interests in cultural 

production and consumption and questions of nation-formation and 

nationhood in and outside Italy. 200p. 



The Livres-Souvenirs of Colette 

Genre and the Telling of Time 

by Anne Freadman 

Throughout her career, Colette experimented with 

genre for the purposes of telling stories of her life. The 

books that resulted, known collectively as her “livressouvenirs,” 

are far from being autobiographies in the 

customary sense. By addressing the need to 

reconsider the generic issues surrounding autobiographical story- telling, Anne 

Freadman’s study brings the richness of “the genre question” to the fore, 

shedding a fresh light on this much-loved body of work. From the vignettes of 

La Maison de Claudine to the note-books of L’étoile vesper and Le Fanal bleu, 

from stories of losing to stories of collecting, Colette’s memory books take 

different narrative forms and explore the passing of time in different ways. This 

book investigates Colette’s variegated generic choices as so many ways of 

“telling time”. 200p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 33, July 2012 


Maryse Condé and the Space of 

Literature 

by Eva Sansavior 

The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse Condé has 

for the last twenty-five years divided her time between 

her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the 

author’s work has attracted much critical attention in 

the United States, it is her fictional works that have 

been the focus of this attention, with these predominantly read in the light of 

political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive 

readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader thematic and 

generic approach to the author’s work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and 

oblique uses of literature in Condé’s literary and critical work, tracking its 

complex interactions with tradition, reception, politics and autobiography, and 

also the singular possibilities that these interactions present for re- imagining 

the ideas of politics, literature, identity and, ultimately, the nature of critical 

practice itself. 200p. 

The Subversive Poetics of Alfred Jarry 

Ubusing Culture in the Almanachs du Père Ubu 

by Marieke Dubbelboer 

Paradox and provocation were essential features of all 

of the work of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). His nonconformist 

attitude, whether employed to subvert 

literary or artistic conventions or to scrutinize social 

and political issues, marked both his literary writing 

and his view of the world. Nowhere is this more 

apparent than in the experimental and satirical Almanachs du Père Ubu (1898 

and 1901), which to date have received little critical attention. Jarry’s ground 

breaking use of collage in these early works, his absurdist humour and his 

rethinking of literary authorship and artistic originality foreshadow many 

innovations of twentieth-century art and literature. In this generously 

illustrated study, Marieke Dubbelboer examines key characteristics of Jarry’s 

poetics through an analysis of the Almanachs and addresses their role within 

the European avant-garde. 152p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 32, July 2012 


Maney Publishing, Legenda Research Monographs in French Studies 35, 2012 




Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary 

French 

A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation 

by Mairi McLaughlin 

It is widely held that the large-scale translation of 

international news from English will lead to 

changes in French syntax. For the first time this 

assumption is put to the test using extensive 

fieldwork carried out in an international news 

agency and a corpus of translated news agency 

dispatches. The linguistic analysis of three syntactic structures in the 

translations is complemented by an investigation of the effects of a range of 

factors including, most notably, the speed at which the translation is carried 

out. The analysis sheds new light on the ways in which news translation could 

lead to syntactic borrowing in French, and by extension, in other languages. 

136p. 



LEGENDA STUDIES IN YIDDISH 

Studies in Yiddish is the only scholarly series in English that is 

dedicated to Yiddish, a transnational language whose interesting, if 

sometimes tragic, history spans more than a thousand years. The 

series includes monographs and edited volumes on all aspects of 

Yiddish language and culture. 

Translating Sholem Aleichem 

History, Politics and Art 

edited by Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, 

Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov 

Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was 

commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the 

most popular Yiddish authors. But few people 

today are able to read him in the original. Since the 

1920s, however, Aleichem’s works have been 

known to a wider international audience through 

numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most 

famously Fiddler on the Roof. This volume examines those translations 

published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European 

contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature. 214p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Yiddish 10, July 2012 


Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets 

Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the Roman 

de la Rose 

by Sylvia Huot 

The Roman de la Rose explicitly offers an ‘art of love’, 

while also repeatedly asserting that the experience 

of love is impossible to put into words. An 

examination of the intertextual density of the Rose, 

with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin 

authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, 

pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation 

of sources. Huot’s new book focuses on Guillaume de Lorris’s use of the Ovidian 

corpus, and on Jean de Meun’s dazzling orchestration of allusions to a wider 

range of Latin writers: principally Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil, but also including 

John of Salisbury and Alain de Lille. In both parts of the Rose, poetic allegory is 

a language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable. 123p. 



A Captive of the Dawn 

The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) 

edited by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, 

David Schneer and Jordan Finkin 

Peretz Markish (1895-1952) was a fiercely 

independent maverick who published work in all 

literary genres. Markish always went his own way in 

a literary career spanning four decades and 

embracing almost all twentieth-century aesthetic 

movements. After the Revolution, he settled in 

Poland, but returned to be integrated more closely into Soviet culture than any 

other Yiddish writer of his generation, receiving the Order of Lenin. It did not 

save him from Stalin’s show-trials of Jewish intellectuals, and he was executed 

in 1952, but as early as 1955 his writing was being rehabilitated in the Soviet 

press: a testament to his literary stature. This new volume combines a biography 

and bibliography with some twenty contributed essays by Peretz scholars, 

surveying the entire corpus of his work and all periods of his career. 244p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Yiddish 9, July 2011 




LEGENDA STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 

Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely 

across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different 

artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences. 

Alienation and Theatricality 

Diderot after Brecht 

by Phoebe von Held 

Alienation (Vefremdung) as a dramaturgical device 

has come to be inextricably linked with the name of 

German twentieth-century playwright and theorist, 

Bertolt Brecht - with the context of Modernism, the 

Avant garde, and Marxist Theory. As a sociological 

and aesthetic notion avant la letter, it did however 

already exist in the thought of eighteenth-century 

French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot. This original study of scholar and 

theatre director Phoebe von Held destabilises the conventional understanding 

of alienation through a reading of Le Paradoxe sur le comédien and Le Neveu de 

Rameau, thereby opening it up to new ways of interpretation and aesthetic 

practices. 240p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature 17, 2011 


Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy 

by Sibylle Erle 

The Way of the World 

A Festschrift for R.H. Stephenson 

edited by Paul Bishop 

Inaugurated with a collection of intercultural 

readings of Goethe on the occasion of the 250th 

anniversary of his birth, the series Cultural Studies 

& the Symbolic has, to date, examined various 

aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms. 

In its fourth volume, we turn our attention to the 

world, in the sense in which Nietzsche contrasts the 

astral order in which we live as opposed to the total character of the world 

which is, he tells us, in all eternity chaos. The volume is offered as a Festschrift 

for Roger Stephenson, who recently retired from the William Jacks Chair of 

Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. It consists of a collection of 

essays reflecting his interests in various aspects of modern German and 

European literature, and his particular engagement with Weimar classicism, 

the so-called Meisterdenker tradition of ideas, and his commitment to close 

reading - illuminated by theory - within a broad cultural context. 154p. 

Maney Publishing, Cultural Studies and the Symbolic 4, 2011 


William Blake never travelled to the continent, and 

yet his creation myth is far more European than has 

so far been acknowledged. His early illuminated 

books, of the 1790s, run alongside his professional 

work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter’s 

translation of Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on 

Physiognomy, in which Blake helped to make a 

likeness of a book about likenesses. Blake, Lavater, 

and Physiognomy demonstrates how the problems occurring during the 

production of the Hunter translation resonate in Blake’s treatment of the 

Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body, and 

interrogates the idea that ‘God created man after his own likeness.’ He 

introduces the ‘Net of Religion’, a device which presses the human form into 

material shape, giving it personality and identity. As Erle shows, Blake’s 

startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater’s pursuit of 

physiognomy: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of their 

contemporary men. 244p. 

Maney Publishing, Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature 21, 2010 



Northcote House Publishers 

NORTHCOTE HOUSE 

Writers and their Work, launched in 1994, embraces the best of modern literary theory and 

criticism, and features studies of many popular late-twentieth-century writers, as well as the canonical 

figures of literature and important literary genres. An important element of the series is to bring 

neglected or marginalized writers to a wider readership, to represent fully the rich diversity of postcolonial 

writing and to show the breadth and density of women’s writing through the centuries. 

The price of all paperback editions has now been permanently lowered to $19.95. For a full list, please 

see our website. 

George Meredith 

by Jaqueline Banerjee 

George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest 

poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction 

distilled, contributed to and animated the major 

debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an 

arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer 

for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, 

larger-than-life figure, he has always had his 

admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn 

to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and 

experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets of 

Modern Love, his ‘Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’, and novels 

like The Egoist, have attained the status of classics. The present study focuses on 

such works, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile 

writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable 

voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century. 128p. 




Jean Rhys 

Second Edition 

by Helen Carr 

Neglected and forgotten for many years, the 

arresting, elliptical novels written by the 

Domenican-born Jean Rhys are now widely 

acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide 

Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a 

central text for the imaginative re-examination of 

gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr’s 

account draws on both recent feminist and postcolonial 

theory, and places Rhys’s work in relation to modernist and 

postmodernist writing. Whilst all Rhys’s novels are autobiographical, it is a 

mistake, Carr argues, to see them simply in individual terms: Rhys uses the 

material of her own life to structure a devastating critique of the greed and 

cruelty of the Establishment world, both of Europe and of Empire. This new 

edition considers the growing body of critical appreciation of Jean Rhys. 128p. 



James Joyce 


by Steven Connor 

This new edition of Professor Steven Connor’s 

book is an animated accessible introduction to the 

whole range of Joyce’s work from Dubliners 

through to Finnegan’s Wake. 128p. 

Salman Rushdie 


by Damian Grant 

The new edition of the successful first edition will 

cover all of Rushdie’s work up to the present. 

128p. 

Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, August 2012 






Pre-Romantic Poetry 

by Vincent Quinn 

Pre-Romantic Poetry intervenes powerfully in 

debates about eighteenth-century writing, 

Romanticism, and literary history. By arguing that 

‘pre-romanticism’ exists to patrol the limits of 

‘romantic’ writing, this book questions existing 

approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury 

writing, and to period-based study more 

generally. As well as presenting pioneering reinterpretations 

of poets such as Thomas Gray and 

William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry reads late-eighteenth-century poetry 

alongside earlier writers (especially Alexander Pope) and later ones (including 

William Wordsworth and John Keats). Paying particular attention to pastoral 

poetry, patronage, and occasional poetry, the book historicizes questions of 

language and form in order to shift prevailing notions of eighteenth-century 

and Romantic writing. 140p. 




Pre-Raphaelitism 

Poetry and Painting 

by Lindsay Smith 

This book re-assesses the significance to Pre- 

Raphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of 

poem to painting, of the visual to the verbal, to 

examine those aspects of the movement that 

account for its enduring legacy. Beginning with 

the profound and somewhat neglected influence 

of Ruskin’s work upon the poets and painters, 

Smith focuses in particular upon the Pre- 

Raphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of 

ekphrasis as played out in the short-lived periodical The Germ and in D.G. 

Rossetti’s Sonnets for Pictures. At the heart of the project is a new reading of 

the notorious circumstances of Rossetti’s coffined book - those manuscript 

poems Rossetti disinterred from his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s grave that brings to 

the fore the all-pervasive significance to the Pre-Raphaelites of a complex 

aesthetic of resurrection. 128p. 




Children’s Literature 

From the fin de siècle to the new 

millennium 

by Kimberley Reynolds 

The literary scene in the 1890s changed rapidly, 

with ‘serious’ writers defining themselves against 

popular fiction and that read by women and 

children. As modernist influences changed the 

style and concerns of adult fiction, many areas of 

publishing for children seemed determined to 

uphold traditional class and gender roles and to 

perpetuate a strong sense of national loyalty. During the twentieth century, 

however, a rise in secularism, new political, cultural and scientific theories and 

the emergence of youth culture expanded the range of issues and attitudes 

found in children’s books. This updated version of Children’s Literature in the 

1890s and 1990s, reflects on these changes and how they have helped to 

shape the new century. It includes a revised and expanded bibliography. 128p. 

The Imagist Poets 

by Andrew Thacker 

This book offers a lively account of the Imagist 

Poets, the first significant group of modernist 

poets writing in English. It discusses what their 

writing achieved, and analyses the theoretical 

claims of Imagism in relation to its poetic 

practice. It revises the received view of Imagism 

by drawing upon current re-readings of 

modernism in terms of gender and sexuality, 

cultural geography, and the idea of literary 

institutions and formations. The book shows the variety of practice within the 

Imagist group, and shifts the focus from seeing Imagism purely as the creation 

of Ezra Pound, by granting a much stronger focus, to often overlooked figures 

such as Amy Lowell, F.S. Flint and John Gould Fletcher. The book also examines 

the cultural formation of Imagism as a movement competing within the 

artistic avant-garde of London in the early twentieth century. 128p. 








G.K. Chesterton 

by Michael D. Hurley 

A revaluation of the vastly varied work of G.K. 

Chesterton through a literary reading of his 

philosophy, and a philosophical reading of his 

fiction. Novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, 

historian, journalist, Christian apologist, literary 

and social critic, G.K. Chesterton was one of the 

most protean and prolific writers of his age. 

Bernard Shaw called him a ‘colossal genius.’ This 

study determines the scale and quality of that 

genius. Interest in Chesterton today tends to be divided between those who 

enjoy his stories as an end in themselves, and those who argue his unique 

contribution to metaphysics. By comparing the ethical sympathies and literary 

style of his work across different genres, Michael D. Hurley brings Chesterton’s 

divided selves together: to show how his achievement as a writer and a thinker 

are inseparable, and why his philosophy must therefore be read aesthetically, 

and his fiction read philosophically. 128p. 

Janet Frame 

by Claire Bazin 

An accessible close re-reading of Frame’s novels 

and short stories from an autobiographical 

perspective. This study examines the whole of 

Janet Frame’s output starting with the fiction 

(novels, short-stories and poems) before focusing 

on the two autobiographical novels, Owls do Cry 

and Faces in the Water, to end with the 

autobiographical trilogy, a sort of restorative 

prism inviting us to (re) read all her preceding 

works. It is the autobiography and its film version, An Angel at My Table (1990, 

directed by Jane Campion), that won her international fame. Frame’s life is 

extraordinary, not only because she was spared a lobotomy by winning a prize 

for her collection of short stories, but also because writing from the ‘rim of the 

farthest circle,’ she provides food for thought for anyone interested in 

postcolonial and gender studies. 140p. 

Northcote House Publishers, Writers and their Work, 2012 






Elizabeth Barrett Browning 

by Simon Avery 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was one of 

the most important poets of the nineteenth 

century and has recently undergone a major 

critical reappraisal. In this new study, Simon Avery 

examines a range of her poems, both well-known 

and less familiar, drawn from across her career, in 

order to explore the concern with the search for a 

meaningful home which underpins much of her 

writing. In a series of interrelated chapters on 

Barrett Browning’s religious poetry, love poetry, political poetry, and her major 

work, Aurora Leigh, he considers the ways in which the speakers and 

protagonists of her poems constantly search for a place of security and stability 

even though this often seems finally unattainable. Attention is also given to 

Barrett Browning’s own search for a home in relation to inherited poetic models 

and traditions, and her establishment of an often radical poetics. 126p. 




R.K. Narayan 

by Nicolas Grene 

A detailed critical study of the leading Indian 

novelist in English and a key figure in the 

development of a distinctive postcolonial 

literature. This study covers all of Narayan’s work, 

offering an accessible introduction to his life and 

fiction with detailed analyses of the major novels. 

The chapters are organised on a thematic basis to 

allow a focus on the most significant critical 

issues his work raises. The introduction sketches 

the outline of his life and the chapters go on to explore how his own 

background was developed into the fictional South Indian small town of 

Malgudi; the controversial issue of Narayan’s politics; the submerged fables 

that animate some of his key novels and Narayan’s attitudes toward modernity 

as reflected in his essays and his fiction. Finally, there is an analysis of Narayan 

as storyteller and the special styles he devised to tell his elliptical, subtle and 

understated tales. 144p. 






Norman MacCaig 

by Alasdair Macrae 

Norman MacCaig, who died in 1996, was a prolific 

poet whose later poetry is accessible and popular. 

This study locates him in his literary and social 

contexts and presents his work according to its 

major emphases. Although he did not manifest 

dramatic changes of attitude or form, there are 

substantial developments in his writing and these 

are explored. A sufficient number of poems are 

quoted in their entirety to provide readers, 

unacquainted with the poet, with an introduction to the poetry, while the 

discussion of issues and the analysis of individual poems should enhance the 

understanding and enjoyment of readers already familiar with MacCaig. The 

ambition of this book is not to suffocate the poems with commentary but to 

allow the intelligence, humour and humaneness of the poems to speak to the 

readers and shock, delight and challenge them. 120p. 




The Nineteenth-Century Sensation 

Novel 

New edition 

by Lynn Pykett 

A fully revised edition of The Sensation Novel 

taking account of wider interest in, and critical 

coverage of, this important and popular genre. 

First published in 1994, Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation 

Novel charted the re-emergence into critical view 

of a nineteenth-century fictional genre which 

had, in its own day, enjoyed immense popular 

success and given rise to heated critical and moral debates. Since the mid- 

1990s, the sensation novel has continued to attract the attention of general 

readers, critics and scholars and has been brought to fresh audiences through 

television and radio adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret, The Moonstone, an 

Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on The Woman in White and a film of 

Basil. Among the recent studies of the genre, several have sought to shift 

critical attention from a relatively narrow range of texts published in the 1860s 

to include texts from later decades of the century. This revised and expanded 

version responds to these developments. 170p. 



Olive Senior 

by Denise deCaires Narain 

This study of Olive Senior’s writing includes 

comprehensive coverage of her poetry, short 

stories as well as her non-fiction, placing this 

work in the context of debates about what it 

means to be Jamaican and Caribbean in the 20th 

and 21st centuries. Senior’s work remains 

intensely focused on loving portraits of ‘ordinary’ 

Jamaicans, whether they are struggling to make a 

living off the land in harsh rural contexts or to 

negotiate the complex postcolonial realities of life in the city. Senior scrutinises 

the way power operates at global and local levels, and the reader is always 

made aware of the bigger historical narratives which position the individuals 

that she writes about. In opting for a more cunningly mild-mannered literary 

voice, Dr Narain argues that Senior’s work provided a nuanced, engaged and 

gendered alternative definition for ‘writing resistance’ than is usually 

associated with Caribbean writers. 154p. 





New and Recent Titles in Literature 

Sehen Sie, so stirbt man also! 55 

beste letzte Worte 

by Cornelius Hartz 

When a person dies, his last words have a very 

special significance. At best, they should 

summarize an entire life in one sentence. Words 

such as “More Light” (Goethe) or “You too, Brutus” 

(Caesar) are entered into cultural history - even if 

they are sometimes fictitious. In this volume, 

Cornelius Hartz presents 55 last words of famous 

men and women - from antiquity to the present, 

from Socrates, Beethoven, Jane Austen and James Dean to John Paul II. In 

addition to investigating the veracity of the quotes, there is also background 

information about the circumstances of each death. 160p. 

Philipp von Zabern, 2012 


Memory and Legacy 

A Thackeray Family Biography, 1876-1919 

by John Aplin 

This book, the second of two volumes, details not 

only the author’s life, but also the cosmopolitan 

and literary worlds inhabited by his two 

daughters, Minny and Annie. Memory and Legacy 

continues the family saga long after Thackeray’s 

death, tracing the later lives of his two daughters 

and their marriages. Annie in particular, took 

responsibility for guarding and shaping her 

father’s legacy until her own death in 1919. Drawing extensively on the letters, 

diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds 

light on this remarkable man’s family, and the effect that his life, death and 

legacy had on those closest to him. Aplin’s two-part study incorporates 

significant new documentary evidence, some of it never previously seen by 

Thackeray scholars, and includes the fullest and frankest examination of the 

lives of Thackeray’s two daughters yet published. This will also appeal to 

followers of Viriginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. 315p. 

Lutterworth Press, 2011 


The Inheritance of Genius 

A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798-1875 

by John Aplin 

In his day, William Makepeace Thackeray was one 

of England’s premier novelists, possessed of both 

great cultural insight and an incisive pen. With 

time, however, the man himself has fallen from 

view. Seen today only through the window of his 

fiction, the author of Vanity Fair is all too readily 

written off as just another figure amidst the clubcentred, 

bachelor world of mid-Victorian England 

that fills his writings. This volume provides a unique account of Thackeray’s 

women and their place in his life. From a mother too readily written off by 

history as religious fanatic, to a wife institutionalised for most of their 

marriage, to two adult daughters never far from their father’s side, it is 

impossible to separate the writing from the life of the man behind them. Aplin 

presents the first wholly new reappraisal of Thackeray’s life, writing, and legacy 

through the lens that truly defined him - his family. 324p. 



The Lost Literature of Socialism 


by George Watson 

In his hard-hitting and controversial book, George 

Watson examines the foundation texts of 

socialism to find out what they really say; the 

result is blasphemy against socialism’s canon of 

saints. Marx and Engels publicly advocated 

genocide in 1849; Ruskin called himself a violent 

Tory and a King’s man; and Shaw held the 

working classes in utter contempt. Drawing on a 

range of sources from Robert Owen to Ken Livingstone, the author 

demonstrates that socialism was a conservative, nostalgic reaction to the 

radicalism of capitalism, and not always supposed to be advantageous to the 

poor. George Watson’s concern is to pay proper respect to the works of the 

founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say and not what their 

modern disciples wish they had said. This invigorating book forces the reader to 

abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought. It is certain to ruffle 

feathers, blue as well as red. 128p. 





In the Name of the Father (And of 

the Son) 

by Immanuel Mifsud 

Back from his father’s funeral, the narrator starts 

reading a diary his father kept during his days as 

a soldier during the Second World War. The diary 

is almost impersonal, but it is exactly this 

impersonality which pushes the narrator to reexamine 

the relationship he had with his father. 

The father, who the son knew only as a cripple 

after he had been injured in a motorcycle 

accident, had always tried to convince those around him that he was tough 

enough to withstand all hardship, and had tried to bring up his son in his 

mould. The narrator revisits his father’s past, as well as his own, to find signs of 

weakness and displays of emotion. The narrator is not only older, which makes 

him attach new meanings to old events, but he has also changed in other 

ways, which influences the way he now sees things. 64p. 

Midsea Books, 2011 


Fiabe toscane di maghi, fate, 

animali, diavoli e giganti 

Edizione economica. Volumes I and 2 

by Carlo Lapucci 

Carlo Lapucci presents an annotated collection of 

Italian fables drawn from his childhood and the 

Tuscan tradition to which his father Enrico 

introduced him. Two volumes, divided into five 

thematic sections: Animals, Magicians and 

Fairies, Giants, Devils and Tricksters. Lapucci’s 

scholarly work includes the cultural and critical 

references necessary to frame these tales in their 

historical, mythological and magical traditions. Illustrations by Walter Bini. 

Italian text. 

Edizioni Polistampa, La Toscana racconta, 2011 

Volume 1 

228p, illus, 9788856300581, paperback – $20.00. Special Offer $16.00 

Volume 2 

204p, 9788856300673, paperback – $19.50. Special Offer $16.00 

I Monti Orfici di Dino Campana 

Un saggio, dieci passeggiate 

by Giovanni Cenacchi 

Dino Campana’s descriptions of ten trails in the 

Apennine Mountains trace the philosophical and 

poetic myths of the road as much as they do the 

trails themselves. This piece of Italian literary 

heritage offers readers the opportunity to seek 

out the places described by Campana, to admire 

their horizons, while sharing the poet’s ideals and 

life within this landscape. Italian text. 208p. 

Le leggende della terra toscana 

by Carlo Lapucci 

Local legends can sometimes reveal more about a 

place than facts, often with a voice that dates 

from antiquity. With metaphors and symbols, 

traditional local legends united cities, kingdoms, 

and communities, giving consciousness, identity, 

and creative vigor to ancient Rome and the 

Italian Communes. This in-depth study offers a 

panorama of Tuscan legends with careful analysis 

that reveals the richness of these fantastical 

resources and their contribution to the heritage of this region. Italian text. 

640p. 

Edizioni Polistampa, Italianistica nel mondo, 2011 


Edizioni Polistampa, Italianistica nel mondo, 2011 




Indagine sul ‘Processo’ di Kafka 

La separazione e la colpa 

by Stefano Pasquini 

This journey through Kafka’s universe 

combines critical reading and 

psychological analysis in exploring The 

Trial. The Hebrew atmosphere of early 

twentieth-century Prague, the Kabala and 

Kafka’s family, as well as his rejection of 

bourgeois values are all present, and 

Kafka saw literature as the only escape 

from the mediocrity of reality. These are 

some of the principal aspects that define this work and one of the most 

difficult and loved writers of the last century, who traced the essentials of man 

and the elements of modernity. Italian text. 272p. 

Edizioni Polistampa, Biblioteca del Caffè, 2011 


Shakespeare’s London 

Theatreland 

Archaeology, History and Drama 

by Julian Bowsher 

This guide to the unique theatrical venues 

of London, from 1567, when the first 

playhouse was built, to 1642, when 

Cromwell closed them down, sets out the 

rich dramatic history of this period in 

relation to the latest exciting 

archaeological evidence. The book also 

details the people involved - the builders, 

actors, playwrights and audiences - what they wore and what they ate, where 

they drank, where they fought, where they lived and died. There are theatrical 

quotes and jokes, and illustrations old and new, while a series of walks 

explores different areas of today’s London, where glimpses of Shakespeare’s 

London can still be caught. 250p, illustrated in colour. 

Fiktion als Erkenntnistheorie bei Diderot 

by Yann Lafon 

As a philosopher of the French Enlightenment period, Diderot rejects, in the 

tradition of Locke, the view of God-given ideas, and, from a mainly materialistic 

perspective, addresses the problem of a theory of the origin of ideas. But early 

on he notices the narrow confines of the empirical verifiability of his theory. To 

overcome this limitation - as well as from the standpoint of an aesthetic lust for 

design - he also explores the mysteries of knowledge with the exploratory 

possibilities of fiction. In this work, Yann Lafon discovers new contexts of the 

fictional texts of Diderot. He thereby reconstructs dimensions of his theory that 

point beyond the materialist assumptions of Diderot. German text. 228p. 

Franz Steiner Verlag, ZFSL-B 38, 2011 


Verteidigung des Lebens durch Poesie 

Über die Moderne von Klopstock bis Benn 

by Hans Dieter Schäfer 

In a period, which is shaped through speed and the pressures to perform and 

compete, there is a great sense of desire for freedom and the wish to live. Hans 

Dieter Schäfter shows that these themes are already found in the works of 

Klopstock, Eichendorff, Kafka and Benns. He illuminates the backgrounds of the 

development of their works in the mirror of modernity. German text. 72p, illus. 

Franz Steiner Verlag, AM-L 2011.1, 2011 


Calderón y su escuela 

Variaciones e innovación de un modelo teatral: XV Coloquio 

Anglogermano sobre Calderón Wroclaw, 14-18 de julio de 2008 

edited by Manfred Tietz and Gero Arnscheidt 

The texts used in the extraordinarily successful theater system of the Spanish 

Baroque are all based on a few basic formulas (comedia, auto sacramental, 

interludes) that were standardized and differentiated from preceding texts by 

Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and his students. In this anthology, 31 studies by 

international specialists show how this system was thematically and formally 

refined and modified by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681), the leading 

playwright of the Siglo de Oro, and his school. German text. 553p. 

Museum of London Archaeology, September 2012 


Franz Steiner Verlag, Archivum Calderonianum 12, 2011 




Das Nibelungenlied und Das 

Buch des Dede Korkut - 

Sprachwissenschaftliche 

Aspekte 

Beiträge zum ersten interkulturellen 

Symposion in Baku, Aserbaidschan, 

2009 

edited by Kamal Abdullayev, Hendrik 

Boeschoten, Sieglinde Hartmann 

and Uta Sörmer-Caysa 

With this conference volume the Kitab 

Dede Korkut moves into the focal point of 

intercultural comparative studies for the medieval heroic epic. The Saxon State 

and Regional Library in Dresden preserves the oldest and only complete 

transmission of this pre-Ottoman heroic poem. The Mainz Turkologist, Hendrik 

Boeschoten, offers the newest German translation: Ideal conditions for the 

beginning of scholarly cooperation between Azerbaijan and Germany, which 

aims at a rapprochement of academic discourse between the east and west. 

The themes dealt with in this volume arise from individual linguistic 

perspectives, such as syntax, lexicon, word formation, name studies or speechact 

theory. This conference volume is not only a first bridge-building attempt 

between east and west, but also a novelty for German studies on the 

Nibelungenlied. 192p, illus. 

Reichert Verlag, Imagines Medii Aevi 28, 2011 


Studien zu ausgewählten 

Fastnachtspielen des Hans Folz 

Struktur - Autorschaft - Quellen 

by Martin Przybilski 

At the threshold of modernism, the 

artisan poet Hans Folz plays a significant 

role as author and printer in the cultural 

center of Nuremberg. Part of his 

multifaceted oeuvre includes at least 18 

carnival plays (Fastnachtspiele) that are 

currently being edited and commented 

on at the University of Trier. The studies contained in this volume were 

produced as part of this new edition of the Nuremberg carnival plays. They 

focus on four works by Hans Folz and illuminate them through structural, as 

well as material and motive-historical aspects. Particularly, a sustainable 

picture of the author’s specific operational processes is drawn. In addition, the 

volume contains an edition of the poem “Von den zwelff fauln pfaffenknecht” 

(“Of the Twelve Lazy Servants”) and a concordance of the new edition of the 

still relevant publication of Adelbert von Keller’s carnival plays. German text. 

160p. 

Reichert Verlag, 2011 


Äsop - Der frühneugriechische 

Roman 

Einführung, Übersetzung, 

Kommentar. Kritische Ausgabe 

by Hans Eideneier 

The “Vita Aesopi,” known today as “Aesop’s 

Fables,” characterizes the life of the 

legendary fabulist Aesop, through to his 

death in Delphi, with a variety of funny 

individual episodes. Four versions from 

around 1600 are published here as 

evidence of early Modern Greek rhythmic 

narrative prose. A detailed text- and source-critical introduction with references 

to the profile of the “Metaphrastes,” an extensive commentary on each chapter, 

and a German translation with illustrations from the “Ulmer Aesop” (1476) 

develop this key text of medieval popular literature. German text. 446p, illus. 

Reichert Verlag, Serta Graeca 28, 2011 


Anime Nude 

Finzioni e Interpretazioni Intorno a 

10 Poeti del Novecento. Cvetaeva, 

Apollinaire, Wilcock, Kavafis, 

Achmatova, Borges, Hardy, Brodskij, 

Hikmet, Rilke 

by Silvio Ciappi and Francesco Ricci 

Through these ten poems and ten poetic 

descriptions, ten poets come to life in a 

blend of fiction and reality, poetry and 

psychology that traces a path to 

understanding the artistic works of the 

nineteenth century. Italian text. 104p, illus. 

Mauro Paglia, Storie del mondo, 2011 



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